Cardinal Dolan Sets the Record Straight

"The Son of God was homeless; his earthly parents were immigrants and refugees."

I knew I was too smart to be a Bishop, but a Cardinal?

Too Catholic to be a Bishop

 From "The Catholic Thing". Read the whole thing.

The political season, alas, we always have with us now, but last week it took a turn in earnest.
Father Robert E. Morey, a courageous priest in South Carolina, denied former Vice-President Joe Biden Holy Communion owing to the longstanding public scandal of his support for unlimited abortion. To my mind when Biden, as vice-president, performed the wedding ceremony for two gay White House staffers, it was a cynical move for LGBT support, but far more importantly another brazen scandal demanding a response from the Church. He has been essentially defying the American bishops for decades, knowing that it’s highly likely they won’t dare put him on the spot.
Reactions to that priest’s act fell, as always happens, along the usual political lines. But this is not a political matter. It’s a question of whether the Church, as it claims, takes seriously the most serious things, namely the nature of the Eucharist and what it means for someone to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

There have been various dodges from the Church hierarchy on this matter. New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, for example, remarked that he would never judge the state of someone else’s soul. But that’s not what is involved in the Biden case and many others like it. The question is whether to allow someone who has publicly adopted positions – and acted on them – that are directly contrary to the teachings of the Church and constitute grave scandal – to go along just like any other Catholic.

Scandal does not mean, as it does in the tabloids, that you’ve done something spectacularly wrong. In Catholicism, it means a public stumbling block that confuses people, Catholic and not, about grave matters like abortion and God’s intentions in creating the two sexes.

One Believes in Something, One Does Not

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York has responded to questions about the denial of Holy Communion to former Vice President Joe Biden last Sunday.

During an Oct. 31 interview with Fox News, Cardinal Dolan said that he thought the incident was a good teaching moment about the Eucharist and the seriousness of denying Church teaching, but that he would not himself deny anyone reception of the Eucharist.

“So whether that prudential judgment was wise, I don’t want to judge him either,” Cardinal Dolan said of Father Robert Morey, who denied Holy Communion to Biden. “I wouldn’t do it.”

“Sometimes a public figure will come and talk to me about it. And I would advise them, and I think that priest [Morey] had a good point: You are publicly at odds with an issue of substance, critical substance, we’re talking about life and death and the Church,” Cardinal Dolan said.

Receiving the Eucharist “implies that you’re in union with all the Church believes and stands for. If, you know, you’re not, well, integrity would say, ‘Uh oh, I better not approach Holy Communion.’ That’s always preferable than to make a split-second decision and denying somebody,” Cardinal Dolan added.

Mustn't be judgemental, right Cardinal?

The USCCB Is On The Case!

 So they will dither and hurumph and say some pish along with some posh.


Washington D.C., Jun 6, 2019 / 05:01 pm (CNA).- When the U.S. bishops arrive in Baltimore next week for their second plenary meeting since a year of serious crisis began last June, they will do so under the specter of another demoralizing scandal. This one involves a well-connected bishop, a ledger of extravagant gifts, and allegations of abuse from priests and seminarians subject to the bishop’s authority.

The Washington Post reported June 5 that a months-long ecclesiastical investigation of Bishop Michael Bransfield, formerly of Wheeling-Charleston, West Virginia, had uncovered evidence that the bishop had a reputation for being sexually inappropriate with seminarians and young priests, that he may have had a substance-abuse problem, and that he used diocesan funds generated from its Texas oil fields to support a lifestyle of luxury, and to give $350,000 in cash gifts to Vatican officials, fellow bishops, and other clerics.

More troubling, the Post’s report suggests that when seminarians and young priests raised concerns about Bransfield’s behavior, they were met with either indifference or an unwillingness of authorities to intervene.

Some Catholics have already noted that Bransfield’s gift-giving habit likely gives some indication of how Theodore McCarrick’s ecclesial career prospered during his decades of sexual abuse.

Don't worry. Cardinal Dolan is ALSO in the case.

Timothy Cardinal Dolan is dodging questions about what he’s done with cash he received from former West Virginia Bishop Michael Bransfield, who left his post in disgrace amid allegations he sexually harassed seminarians and improperly spent church money.

Over the 13 years Bransfield served as head of the West Virginia diocese, he gave $350,000 in gifts to high-ranking Catholic officials ― money the diocese ultimately reimbursed him for, according to a report from The Washington Post last week.

“It’s incredibly problematic,” Zach Hiner, head of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said of the money. “It seems as if was done to curry favor, or in the hopes that people who know something about you won’t do anything about it.”

Bransfield’s lavish living and generous gifts to fellow clergy were particularly egregious in West Virginia, Hiner said, because of the extreme poverty in the state.

Tricky Little Rat

Conceding that, though the Catholic Church would no longer tolerate blasphemous and heretical decisions made by Catholic politicians, both Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Pope Francis confirmed Thursday that they couldn’t, for the life of them, find a single reason to excommunicate Governor Andrew Cuomo a day after he signed a bill that allows abortions up to the final day of pregnancy.
“Oh, it’s not for a lack of trying,” Dolan told EOTT this morning. “But he’s a sneaky little guy. If he does ever use his public office to do something completely contrary to faith and morals, he doesn’t do it out in the open. He’s like a mob boss. You know he’s up to something, but you just can’t seem to catch him in the act. Trust me, we’ve searched high and low for reasons to excommunicate this guy, but he’s always been one step ahead of us.”

“That tricky little rat,” Pope Francis said as he frantically searched through New York magazines and websites in hopes of finding even the smallest trace of blasphemy. “Sheesh, he’s good! Can’t find a darn thing on this guy. I don’t know—perhaps the best thing to do is to hang tight and be patient. A guy like this, he’s bound to slip and commit an abomination. That’s when we’ll get him.”

What's the Use, Indeed. A Pox On Both Houses.

Some Catholic leaders are calling for the excommunication of Governor Andrew Cuomo in response to the late-term abortion bill he signed last week.
The bill, the so-called Reproductive Health Act, codifies Roe v. Wade in New York law and removes abortion from the state criminal code, legalizing the procedure up to the moment of birth in cases where the mother’s life or health are endangered or where the baby is non-viable. It also allows individuals other than doctors to perform abortions.
Previously, doctors in New York were only allowed to perform an abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy if the mother’s life was in danger.
“Today we are taking a giant step forward in the hard-fought battle to ensure a woman’s right to make her own decisions about her own personal health, including the ability to access an abortion,” Cuomo said.

The governor, a Catholic who recalled his days as an altar boy in his State of the State address earlier this month, publicly celebrated the bill’s signing by ordering One World Trade Center and other landmarks to be lit up in pink.
Many Catholics, including some bishops, responded by urging Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York to excommunicate Cuomo. But Dolan, while admitting that he has gotten “wheelbarrows” of letters asking him to make that move, has indicated he is unlikely to do so, saying the governor is “not going to be moved by this, so what’s the use?”

Showing the courage of leadership we have come to expect from the Catholic Church hierarchy....

Cardinal Dolan...Secret Jesuit?

Cardinal Timothy Dolan on Friday fired back at Attorney General Jeff Sessions for using the Bible to defend the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border, which he called "unbiblical."

The archbishop of New York issued a harsh rebuke of the policy, telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo that it is “un-American.”

“I don't think we should obey a law that goes against what God intends that you would take a baby, a child, from their mom,” he said. “I mean, that's just unjust. That's unbiblical. That’s un-American. There could be no Bible passage that would justify that.”

“God’s law trumps man’s law,” Dolan added, citing a Bible verse to support his counterargument.

Enforcing the law is no "un-American"?

OR...

1) Change the law

2) Stop arriving illegally.

Either way, problem solved.

Baseball For The Masses and the Catholic Mass

No one doubts the sincerity of his conviction that baseball is in trouble, though as a business MLB is obviously flourishing, or that the way out of the imagined crisis is to stress up the game by adding clocks, imposing deadlines on players between pitches, and in general pressuring everyone to hurry. Manfred may assume that it’s despite the increase in game length, not because of it, that more people watch baseball now than when games were shorter. And anyway, his ultimate goal is to quicken the pace of play, for which game length — or game shortness, rather — is only a rough proxy.
 

St. Louis Cardinal Yadier Molina

Bear in mind, however, that pace of play is slower in the NFL. There the ratio of live action to dead time is about half of what it is in MLB. And yet, according to Gallup, Americans prefer football to baseball by a ratio of four to one. Granted, it may be despite all the so-called dead time, not because of it, that football beats baseball in revenue as well as in opinion polls, but maybe that’s enough with the special pleading. Everyone knows that the pauses between the notes are where the art resides, and the evidence that fans like them is greater than the evidence that they don’t.

The assumption that they don’t follows a pattern you might recognize from the Catholic Church’s rewrite of the Mass in the 1960s. The liturgical reformers reduced the amount of dead air, as a radio engineer might think of it. The practice had been that during much of the liturgy the priest prayed sotto voce at the altar while the people in the pews did likewise as they turned the pages of their missal or moved their fingers down the string of their rosary beads. Another option was to close your eyes, forgo all visual, aural, and tactile stimulation, and be still. “Mental prayer,” they called it. It worked fine, at least for those who knew the ropes. For the benefit of those who didn’t, the Church slashed the amount of supposed dead time. That’s when Mass attendance in the West began to plummet. Of course, the people who stopped attending may have done so for other reasons. What we do know is that the increase in the ratio of bustle to quiet didn’t keep them from leaving.

New York Cardinal Dolan

A subcategory of the new Mass was the “guitar Mass,” pitched to the young people. Many of our elders weren’t that much older than we were, but they exaggerated the distance, treating us with the condescending benevolence of a Western anthropologist among people in the bush. They thought we would relate to the holy sacrifice better if we sang lyrics to a Cat Stevens song at the Offertory. God bless the Jesuits who taught my generation of Catholics in the 1970s. They meant well, but they got a lot wrong. A brother of theirs in Argentina grew up to become the pope. I never met him but I recognize his mind.

Cardinal Dolan and the Democrats

Cardinal Timothy Dolan in the Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall, so you can check it out on Fox News):

...the dignity and sanctity of human life, the importance of Catholic schools, the defense of a baby’s civil rights—were, and still are, widely embraced by Catholics. This often led Catholics to become loyal Democrats. I remember my own grandmother whispering to me, “We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans.”
Such is no longer the case, a cause of sadness to many Catholics, me included. … the needs of poor and middle-class children in Catholic schools, and the right to life of the baby in the womb—largely have been rejected by the party of our youth. An esteemed pro-life Democrat in Illinois, Rep. Dan Lipinski, effectively was blacklisted by his own party. Last year, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez insisted that pro-life candidates have no place in the modern Democratic Party.

Talking about New York, he noted:
what is already the most radical abortion license in the country may soon be even more morbidly expanded. For instance, under the proposed Reproductive Health Act, doctors would not be required to care for a baby who survives an abortion. The newborn simply would be allowed to die without any legal implications. And abortions would be legal up to the moment of birth.
The “big tent” of the Democratic Party now seems a pup tent….
I’m a pastor, not a politician, and I’ve certainly had spats and disappointments with politicians from both of America’s leading parties. But it saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.

 Last year, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez insisted that pro-life candidates have no place in the modern Democratic Party.

Noted Catholic, Democrat and Noted Theolgian Nancy Pelosi was Unavailable For Comment